The Los Angeles Physics Teachers Alliance Group (LAPTAG) High School Seismograph Project

Abstract

Following the damaging 17 January 1994 (4:30:55 AM PST; Mw 6.7) Northridge earthquake, several California State University at Northridge (CSUN) research and outreach projects were initiated in seismology. The Northridge earthquake was located (34°12.80′N, 118°32.22′W; depth 18.4 km) one mile south-southwest of Northridge and 20 miles westnorthwest of Los Angeles. The event was produced by a south-dipping, blind thrust fault (Northridge thrust; also known as the Pico thrust). The earthquake was felt by approximately 12 million people within an area of about 212,000 km2 from the San Fernando Valley to Los Angeles. The damage estimate was approximately $20 billion, including $350 million at CSUN (Woods and Seiple, 1995). The outreach project involved the Los Angeles Physics Teachers Alliance Group (LAPTAG) in the early 1990's as an alliance of more than 20 high schools, Santa Monica College, and the University of Southern California (USC) (Gekelman, 1998). One of the LAPTAG science projects involved an inexpensive PC-based seismometer to establish a ten-school seismic network (Figure 1). The goal of this project was to instruct teachers and their students how science is conducted in teams, and to provide lectures to integrate the physics principles into geophysical problems. The high school seismic data files were analyzed by the students and then were transferred to the UCLA Physics Web site (http://coke.physics.ucta.edu/taptag), where they could interchange …